Circle announces integration of USDC and CCTP with Pharos Network

March 27 (Reuters) - An Iran-linked hacking group named Handala claimed responsibility for breaching the personal email account of FBI Director Cash Patel on Wednesday, posting photos and a purported resume online. The group shared a sample of emails spanning 2010 to 2019 that mixed personal and work-related messages. A U.S. Department of Justice official confirmed the breach, though details remain limited. Neither the FBI nor the hackers have provided further comment.

March 27th — Per data from blockchain analytics firm LookOnChain, trader 0xb798 has netted significant profits from two Bitcoin short positions recently, totaling $8.65 million. Just an hour ago, the trader opened another short position—this time shorting 410 BTC valued at $27 million.

On March 27, Bitcoin dropped below $66,000, per HTX market data, with a 4.12% decline over the past 24 hours.

On March 27, Forbes reported that Jed McCaleb—co-founder of Ripple and Stellar—will donate $1 billion from his roughly $3.9 billion cryptocurrency fortune to his nonprofit, the Astera Institute, to develop an AGI system rooted in human brain principles. He has also committed an additional $600 million to neuroscience research. Headquartered in Emeryville, the Astera Institute is currently planning to record neural activity patterns during mouse tasks using brain-machine interfaces, then translate those findings into a new AI architecture. Experiment subjects will eventually expand to include monkeys and humans. McCaleb notes that the current mainstream Transformer architecture lacks key elements like planning, decision-making, and motivation, highlighting the need to explore new directions. AI built on human brain principles, he says, will be more understandable and controllable by humans.

March 27 (Axios) — U.S. Vice President Mike Pence reportedly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call earlier this week, calling Netanyahu “overly optimistic” in his predictions about the U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict and saying he believed Netanyahu “exaggerated the likelihood of Iranian regime change.” The report cites a U.S. official who noted that before the U.S. attacked Iran, Netanyahu had portrayed the conflict to the U.S. as “easily manageable” and emphasized a high chance of “Iranian regime change” — but Pence was skeptical. The official also stated that Pence “played a leading role” in U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations, while Israel was seeking to disrupt those talks.

March 27th — Per LookOnChain monitoring, a whale has been buying ETH against market trends. Address 0xC4eA withdrew 9,976 ETH from Binance via 3 wallets over the past two hours, with the tokens valued at $19.8 million.